Marc Schuhmann & Joern Toellner
The Berlin Fashionweek Photodiary™ #3

Marc Schuhmann & Joern Toellner

Handwritten, hand sketched and closely looked over: The Berlin Fashionweek Photodiary™ provides glimpses behind the scenes of the Berlin Fashion Week - photographed in an “unprettified”, lifelike, and analog style. On October 19th the third edition of the award-winning series will be published by seltmann+söhne.
Models without make-up, an audience full of expectations, Klaus Wowereit kidding with Marc Jacobs, beautiful women on the catwalk, but also left behind rubbish in the foyer or anti-consumption graffiti on the way to the show. In this book seven photographers give us subjective snapshots of the Berlin Fashion Week in July 2011 - and thus the feeling of having been there in person.

Since 2009, photographer Marc Schuhmann and creative director Joern Toellner have been documenting the Berlin Fashion Week in a special way. Instead of sterile images of fancy fashion shows, The Berlin Fashionweek Photodiary ™ gives insights into backstage areas and studios, fittings and castings, sometimes blurred, sometimes from an uncommon point of view - but always authentic, close to the people and with an eye for special moments. “There are enough perfect pictures of fashion shows. I’m interested in the special moments; the look in the eyes of a model just before she steps out onto the runway” says Marc Schuhmann.

After the huge success of the two previous editions, The Berlin Fashionweek Photodiary™ #3 takes the subjective diary concept even further, and gets even more personal: all accompanying texts are handwritten - spontaneous notes of journalists during the shows as well as contributions from designers. And the well-known illustrator Henrik Abrahams, who did live sketches during the Fashion Wweek, as well as for the German Vogue Magazin, allows us a glace into his sketchbook.

28 designers are represented in the book. Among other things, we see Iris van Herpen, Perret Schaad, Marcel Ostertag, Patrick Mohr and Vladimir Karaleev from a new perspective - and even catch a glimpse of the otherwise top-secret studio of Lala Berlin during the preparation of the shows. There is also an emphasis on Austrian fashion design.

Once again, all the photographers were working only with small analog rangefinder cameras. “Good pictures are not necessarily taken with expensive lenses,” say both editors. The book omits image processing. Everything should be as authentic as possible - more a contemporary document than a fashion book. Marc Schuhmann and Joern Toellner consciously want to create something enduring and therefore valuable. This is also seen in the manufacturing of the book. Each of the editions designed by Joern Toellner is a quality print, thread-stitched and bound in an embossed velour cover. The edition is strictly limited to 400 numbered copies.